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Samsung confirmed that the 30 million "sales" are shipments into sales channels and not necessarily sell-through numbers to end users. Still, the 30 million mark is a testament to both Samsung's relationship with a diverse array of wireless carriers that have sold the phone as well as the electronics conglomerate's marketing prowess (the S II was featured prominently in advertising during the London Olympics, for example).

"Meeting this sales milestone in five months sets another record for Samsung, and we are extremely proud and yet motivated to continue to provide our customers with products that they love," JK Shin, president of Samsung's mobile division, said in a statement.

While the Galaxy line, and the S III in particular, are not Samsung's only smartphones, they are certainly the company's premier brand, and have helped power the firm to become the world's largest smartphone maker by volume. On smartphones, research firm IDC estimated that Samsung shipped 53.6 million in the third quarter, while Strategy Analytics pegged the number at 56.9 million. Either way, both figures are far ahead of Apple's (NASDAQ:AAPL) 26.9 million iPhone sales in the quarter, though it should be noted that Apple had only nine days' worth of iPhone 5 sales in the third quarter. Apple is the world's No. 2 smartphone vendor, according to estimates.

Nomura Financial Investment in Seoul forecasts that Samsung will sell 67 million smartphones in the fourth quarter, but other analysts are less optimistic, according to the AP. Apple, Nokia (NYSE:NOK), LG Electronics, HTC and others will be putting up fiercer smartphone competition in the fourth quarter than Samsung faced in the third.

THE LIBRARY: WHITEPAPER

Big data is one of this year's hot-button topics for CSPs. There are any different angles to the big-data saga, most of them focused on the pact on telecoms customer relationships. But there's an impact on the etwork operations side as well. As our cover story observes, we're starting to hear terms like "network sibility," which leverages big-data analytics to see not just every nook and anny of the network, but what customers are doing on it - all the way own to the application level - and responding to that. Download today!